Outboard DACs

Planet Of The Apps
Using the Eversolo DMP-A8 recalls HiFi Rose’s streamers, a competitor hailing from South Korea. In similar fashion, the DMP-A8 uses a stripped-down version of Android (minus the GMS layer Google provides on smartphones) optimised to deliver bit-perfect audio to its internal DAC via the custom EOS Audio Engine. Choosing an Android OS also makes life easier for Eversolo as there are a lot of Android developers out there reacting quickly to issues, as evidenced by the regular release of firmware updates.

Most music service apps built for Android smartphones will work just fine on the Eversolo streamer, making the DMP-A8 more versatile than most. A few of these apps may be installed merely by clicking in the interface, while others require you to find the relevant APK app installer – extracting via your own Android device is the safest route before uploading and installing on the DMP-A8.

Being able to use Apple Music is another major win here because there’s no easy way to play its lossless streams on a hi-fi system through a smartphone. On the DMP-A8 a few taps on the screen will suffice, provided you’ve remembered to enable hi-res playback from the settings in the Apple software.

Screen Smarts
Onscreen interfaces have ‘wow’ appeal, but it’s hard to shoehorn the whole thing into a mobile app. Before you know it, you have to run over to the hardware every time you want to tweak something. The DMP-A8 could have suffered from the same shortcoming but, alongside the Eversolo Control app, the developers have added a Cast option which mirrors the streamer’s screen in full on your mobile device.

This is a smart idea that proves its worth the moment you install a third-party app. For both technical and licensing reasons, Eversolo cannot integrate every service you add to the app – if you install Apple Music Classical, for example, you would have to select your choice of music in that service on the device screen. Enable the Cast option, however, and you can remotely view and control the Classical service on your smartphone or tablet from the comfort of the sofa. Problem solved, though the fixed screen ratio does scream out for a larger tablet display, as it’s fiddly even on a sizeable smartphone screen.

North Star
I first pressed the DMP-A8 into a preamp role with my Primare A35.8 power amplifier and Focal Aria Evo X No3 speakers. Playing FLAC files of 2L’s Tuvayhun [2L-171] from internal storage, the DMP-A8 extracted the spatial information and fine detail from this magnificent TrondheimSolistene release. This sense of clarity was especially noticeable at the start of track three, ‘The Merciful’, when soft church bells set the stage and decidedly non-Nordic chanting and flute joined in, creating an Eastern Mediterranean ambience – not something you’d expect from a recording made in Trondheim’s Nidarosdomens cathedral, within sight of the Arctic circle.

Ibrahim Maalouf’s trumpet was displayed in similarly authentic fashion on a great live version of ‘True Sorry’ [10 Ans De Live!, Mi’ster Productions download; 44.1kHz/24-bit], recorded in L’Olympia concert hall in Paris. It built to an emotional and immersive crescendo, but equally the DMP-A8 allowed me to appreciate individual instrumental details. It’s a great combination – resolution but also fluidity and coherency – that made the set fly by when I sat down for an evening’s critical listening.

This live album contains recordings made at different locations over a two-year timespan, which gives some tracks a very different feel than others, and the precise portrayal delivered by the DMP-A8 revealed the changes. Maalouf’s ‘Beirut’ for example, which recounts his childhood story of wandering off into his war-torn hometown and witnessing something so horrible he can only relate it via music (which explains the mad Led Zeppelin-infused outro), was so pitch-perfect that I felt almost present in the Nantes hall in which it was recorded.

Maalouf has a customised trumpet with an extra valve to sometimes play shrill-sounding quarter-notes. On some playback systems this can be a bit much, but Eversolo’s DMP-A8 seemed able to steer clear of stridency. In any case, if the combination with certain loudspeakers had introduced some harshness, the DSP in the Eversolo streamer would have allowed me to slightly roll off the high frequencies, making for a more mellow representation.